Counterpoint: with mobile devices, and increasingly, control and information features of automobiles themselves, distracted driving is increasingly a concern.

There's also the point that driving capabilities vary wildly by individual, and often decline drastically with age. Recent case-in-point, an elderly driver in San Francisco who killed a family of four (a mother, father and two daughters, waiting at a bus stop, not in the roadway at all), let off with a minimal sentence, raising much public furore:

<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-west-portal-cra...>

<https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-francisco-west...>

The driver was speeding (70 mph in a residential area), and possibly driving the wrong way on the street.

> Speed-limits typically remain grandfathered in at their original value

That depends on where you are. In Texas, state highway speed limits are determined though a traffic study[1]. The monitor traffic for a while, then set the limit to the 85th percentile.

People can use this to get out of speeding tickets. If you find that it's been a long time since a speed study was done on the road you were on, the judge might throw the ticket out.

There are some hard limits though. For example, the maximum speed limit that can be set on a road is 85 mph.

[1]: https://www.txdot.gov/safety/driving-laws/speed-limits/speed...

> UK default of 60mph for a single-track road, but if you were to try that in many rural locations (think Cornwall, Scotland, Wales) you would likely find yourself upside-down in a ditch.

The way the national limit is framed is more limit than road speed. It's interesting how we think of the limits as drivers: we get frustrated when other people go slower than the limit, we don't treat it as a limit, we treat it as the speed you should be traveling at.

I live fairly rural in New Zealand (UK expat) and even though you necessarily get a lot of speed variation on the roads around me, due to being winding, having farm traffic, sometimes narrow, you still get idiots who have to be going at the exact limit (or over) and tailgate 1m behind any vehicle in their way. Including trucks who can't really see them when they do that. I enjoy driving fast on those roads but I still don't understand the impatience.